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EXPO MUSINGS

by Tom Cantrell

Start • Bye-Bye VME, Hello PC • Build a Better Box • Wire Fires • I Want My PCTV • Sources 

I WANT MY PCTV

There’s no doubt that the Wintel faithful are trying to diversify beyond the desktop into embedded applications, or rather "Applied Computing" as the Intel PR folks prefer. As far as I can tell, Applied Computing is just expensive embedded computing. Intel would love to replace high-end VME, Unix, and RISC iron with CompactPCI and NT, but they’ll pass on the 50-cent chips for toys and such.

People talk about convergence between the PC and TV. I think there’s going to be a convergence all right—more like a gigantic collision as the forces of embedded (non-Wintel) and applied (Wintel) computing battle for supremacy in your living room. Consider the DTVPC reference design from Teralogic, seen in Photo 8.

Photo 8—Teralogic has a reference design for a PCI plug-in card that turns a PC into a digital TV. Based on heavy-duty MPEG-2 know-how embodied in their Janus chip, the DTVPC is remarkably versatile, accepting both digital (i.e., including all 18 HDTV formats and DVD) and analog source and outputting to a PC monitor or HDTV set.

Thanks to an on-chip line doubler and powerful 19-tap H/V filter-scaling logic, the design is remarkably adept at mix-mastering source in one format to a screen in another— a trick that isn’t easy to pull off. I’ve seen a lot of bad digital video over the years, but the Teralogic DTVPC represents a rather compelling argument that its time has finally come.